Stop this trivial pursuit

Well said. Brendan O’Neill hits the nail on the head again. We are being badly served by the politics of rage. This is what makes our world a really dangerous place.

It’s a year since Trump was inaugurated and, amazingly, the world hasn’t ended. The West hasn’t been plunged into 1930s-style extremism, the American constitution hasn’t been trampled under goose-steps, and Muslims haven’t been marched off to camps. That’s what we were told would happen. Cast your mind back to early 2017: liberal circles fizzed with warnings of a ‘New Hitler’, even whispers of another Holocaust. This spectacularly irresponsible posturing against Trump had two terrible impacts. First, it trivialised historic events like the rise of Nazism, chasing historical accuracy and reason itself out of political debate. And secondly it made criticising Trump more difficult. The Trump of Guardianistas’ rash nightmares came to dominate public discussion, making the real Trump – the man who is politically problematic but not Hitler – more difficult to see, and analyse, and oppose. This year, can we please park the shrill historical illiteracy and get back to grounded debate?